Posts by Pascal Monett

America says banks can now transact using so-called stable crypto-coins. What does that actually mean?

"The incongruity between the treatment of cash and cryptocurrency"

Cash is very different from cryptocoins. Cash is real. It's right there in your hands, and there are tools to check if it's legit.

With virtual money, I think it is a good idea to have more checks and controls. It ensures that the market is going to stay safe.

But I would like somebody to explain to me the notion of "stablecoin". I get BitCoin - you churn some software long enough and you get a coin, which you can then use or sell for it's current market value which is established by supply and demand. But how can you "add" virtual coins to state money without either pushing the system out of whack or being guilty of counterfeiting ?

Techies start growing an Alphabet-wide labor union: 200-plus sign up, only tens of thousands more to go

Re: the claims that it is "rampant" is demonstrably false

Fine. Demonstrate it then.

From Uber to IBM to Google, I have the feeling that I have not stopped reading about sexual harassment cases in major US multinationals since about ten years.

So please, demonstrate that I am wrong.

That would actually be a relief.

Interesting

There doesn't seem to be much love for this internal effort to make Alphabet keep to its "founding motto" (I'll leave that point for another discussion).

I used to be part of a company union. There were no dues and, as we all had work to do, our meetings were kept short and to the point.

When I left that company, the employee union was still functioning in the same way.

I fail to see why everyone is apparently assuming that these 200 employees are looking to enrich themselves when they specifically state they are organizing to help non-full time workers and put an end to sexual harassment.

I find those goals laudable, and it seems that Alphabet is not doing enough on the sexual harassment front - which means it is just another large US company, since they seem to all have that problem.

Where in the world is Jack Ma? Alibaba tycoon not seen since October after slamming Chinese government

Re: They will simply not stand stable for a very long time

Well it's been working in China longer than in the ex-Soviet Union.

But I'm sure that, on a timescale of thousands of years, you must be right.

Maybe.

Looks like Ma thought his money made him powerful, and lost

I guess he was influenced by western moguls and thought he could get away with doing whatever he wanted.

He forgot that he lives in a totalitarian state under a rather inhuman philosophy (Ouighurs, anyone ?).

So he mouthed off and got slapped down. Methinks he should have known better.

On the other hand, maybe he was genuinely trying to use his position to improve his country and its government. In which case he sacrificed himself for the greater good, but to little effect.

So, either his ego made him think he was above the fray, or his lack of vision made him make a dreadful mistake.

In any case, the message is clear : you do not criticize the Chinese Government when you live in China.

Be careful where you log into GitHub: Dev visits Iran, opens laptop, gets startup's entire account shut down

Re: where is the balance?

Theoretically it's simple : your freedom stops where mine starts.

The problem is that you need to be intelligent enough to realize that, and that's why we need laws : to educate the morons who are incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.

It's not a perfect system, I know.

New York Stock Exchange U-turns on decision to boot China's three biggest telcos

A totally useless move

And a U-turn for unknown reasons.

Smells like money shenanigans to me.

Brit infrastructure stuck in neverending restart cycle... and that's just the Microsoft 365 admin center

Yay !

January 5th and we're already at Office 364.

Bug? No, Telegram exposing its users' precise location is a feature working as 'expected'

Re: a huge printed directory of local names, addresses, and telephone numbers

First of all, it was a lot more than 20 thousand.

Second, you're right, but that is the state of technology today. People should stop buying these gadgets that reveal their entire lives for basically no advantage. Why do you need a watch that records your GPS coordinates when you run ? Can't you just run ?

Trump's overhaul of Section 230 stalls, Biden may just throw the web legal shield on the bonfire anyway

Keep descending ?

You've practically arrived, my friend.

Come, chant with us over a sacrificial goat and predict 2021's biggest tech stories to a high degree of accuracy

Brilliant !

A fine bite for the Vultures :)

Suckers for punishment, we added a crawler transporter to our Saturn V

How is that possible ?

How can you not only have missing pieces, but left over pieces that you did not need ?

That is an unbelievable failure of Quality Control. Or is QC a last-millennium thing, only remembered by boomers ?

I don't care that the kit was made in China, if they send pieces you don't need and forget pieces you do, they're wasting money. Surely even a Chinese capitalist can see that.

The myth of fingerprints: The Xiaomi 10T Pro is well-rounded, but it's definitively a sub-flagship handset

"the absence of wireless charging"

Is a Good Thing (TM).

It is once again time to educate people on this abysmally inefficient technology.

It's Global Warming, people. We don't need to waste yet more energy than we already abuse.

China celebrates third year of operations on the far side of the moon

Just goes to show

It doesn't matter where or who, space exploration is awesome !

Indian telco that won Google and Facebook investments flatly denies it’s diversified into farming

"perhaps protestors might think twice"

Protesters thinking ? What next, politicians being honest ?

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Re: This has been .eu policy ever since the TLD was created

No it has not. The article specifically states that the policy was changed when Brexit was declared and, if you had been reading El Reg two years ago, you should remember the amount of facepalming that was going on in these forums at the news.

I personally find this move despicable. It has no reason to exist and appears to be purely motivated by spite - which is not something I approve of.

Singapore changes the rules and will now use COVID-19 contact-tracing app data in criminal cases

And here we go

Step 2 in the Authoritarian Government Handbook is now accomplished : pervert a system made for one thing into a system made for something entirely unrelated.

Congratulations Singapore ! Way to validate the concerns many people were voicing when these tracking apps came out.

Slack serves up out-of-order messages, shaky comms as world goes back to work

Re: Is it me or ....

And a badly programmed backend.

Judge rules Corellium iOS research app 'fair use' in slap to Apple

Re: How many appeals ?

And appeal the appeal, and the appeal of the appeal, and so on and so forth until some court somewhere finally tells them to go fudge themselves - which unfortunately doesn't happen all that often.

SolarWinds mess that flared in the holidays: Biz confirms malware targeted crocked Orion product

A bit simple

"Orion customers are generally massive companies and governments who should have the capabilities to independently detect rogue behaviors and missed this "

You forget one point : Orion customers were trusting a supplier, and the supplier got hacked. It is obvious that Orion customers had flagged Solarwinds software to not be controlled by any of their surveillance tools, why should they ? Solarwinds was a trusted source.

It will be interesting to see the fallout from this utter failure. Not that it is actually entirely Solarwinds fault - this is obviously a highly-specific, targeted attack. it is most difficult to defend against such things.

Except, of course, that Solarwinds could have had a simple CRC check on its published DLLs, with a warning if anything changed unexpectedly. It is ironic to think that such a simple tool would have stopped this attack dead in its tracks.

And I'm not even a security expert.

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

"the age-old problem of the temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent"

Hardly surprising. Everything in computing has been a continuous discovery, and why change what works ?

That is why file systems have evolved under different names, and will continue to do so. NTFS is much better than FAT32, but FAT32 has its uses.

Not a mistake, a demonstration that computing has evolved ans will continue to do so.

You can't be perfect the first time around.

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

"[they] lacked standing to pursue the case, and that they’d sued the wrong target"

Oh FFS, you're supposed to be lawyers, right ? That means you're supposed to know who and how you can sue.

The fact that these clowns filed without standing against the wrong person clearly means the entire cabinet should be disbarred and their accreditation as lawyer revoked.

I would call them a bunch of muppets, but that would be an insult to Muppets.

Oh don't go complicating things now.

Re: proving you needed to be spanked

Yeah but, he likes being spanked.

New York Stock Exchange bins China’s three biggest telcos

"the NYSE isn’t entirely necessary to investors"

Indeed it is not. Finance is global, and been since before Apple became the mage-conglomerate it is today.

The few times I dabbled in buying shares online, I was given a choice of all the stock exchanges that were open at that time. NYSE was not, but Australia was. Of course, I didn't need to choose any stock exchange that far, but the choice was available.

When you have the world available at a click of a mouse, delisting from one entry is not going to make one whit of a difference.

Server won't boot? Forgot to make that backup? Have no fear, just blame Microsoft

Baffleing 'em with BS

As a consultant, I'm guessing it would be easy, but in the long run I believe it is better to be quite honest and own up to one's mistakes. Once you have a reputation for being a liar, it doesn't go away.

That said, I will freely admit that I have sometimes responded quite positively to a user's question about "did you take care of that ?", only to go and feverishly code the solution once the user had gone away.

But I never lie. It's bad for business relations.

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

I hate the stuff they sell these days to access TV. I'm on Orange, and although the fiber line is great, their TV box is a piece of shite. Whether it is on or "off", it's always boiling to the touch.

I'm not an electrician, much less an electronician, but it seems clear to me that if the thing is hot, it's most definitely not off.

Thankfully, there's a switch at the back that actually cuts power to the bloody thing. If there wasen't one, I'd have bought a switch and spliced it into the power cord. I do at least know how to do that.

So it's only turned on when we actually want to watch live TV - which is not all that often.

Re: Firewall vs router

I agree with you, yet I am grateful that ISPs have started putting actual security into their kit. There was a time when said router came with a firewall that left everything open.

At least, the one I got from Orange when I subscribed two years ago came a firewall that was pleasantly closed tight when I checked.

Yes, your ISP can access your router. Well what do you expect ? Your network admin at the office can also access your computer, whether you want it or not.

That's just par for the course.

Sun, sea and sad signage: And lo, they saw a shining light in the sky... oh, it's a BIOS error

Congratulations and Happy New Year !

This little ditty is enormously amusing. I wonder if you'll be able to finish it.

Thank you, El Reg, for all your hard work and entertaining articles.

I look forward to continuing to read you in this new year.

Best Wishes to everyone !

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

I hear you.

My Audi A5 can do almost 500 miles on one tank. It takes 5 minutes to "recharge" it at a any one of thousands of stations.

Unfortunately, my Audi, as much as I love it, is contributing to the problem.

One day, we will all have to adapt and adopt transit times that include spending part of our leisure time recharging a non-polluting car.

And maybe, just maybe, we might learn to appreciate life a bit better by then.

Re: still remember that fantastic 2005 article

I think I've been reading about carbon nanotube batteries for more than a decade.

Where are they ?

Re: the well-known 'good' brands

Might we possibly get a list of those ?

For reference ?

I promise I won't tell.

Buggy chkdsk in Windows update that caused boot failures and damaged file systems has been fixed

Re: Oh wow....

I miss the time when Windows was my OS to manage.

Now Microsoft is deciding what I can or cannot do on my PC.

The only reason I haven't changed OS is because all my customers use Windows, so I'm stuck with this bloated monster that doesn't even obey me all that much.

I look forward to retiring for two reasons : first, no more work days and second, no more Borkzilla software. I'll be on some version of Linux, and Borkzilla can kiss my arse.

Ten more years to go.

Re: Continuous testing is better than building it then testing it after

Maybe so, but continuous change is not supposed to happen in a production environment.

The production environment is supposed to be used, not tested. If you're still testing, it's not ready for production.

In other words, pay more money to be able to use the OS you already paid money for.

I don't see that as a winning situation.

What's that lurking behind the borked face of finance? Windows, of course

Re: OS/2

I followed the link and read that it supports 32-bit and 16-bit applications.

No 64-bit applications.

So it runs on modern hardware like a toddler on a tricycle. You have to push it.

After 11 years, Australia declares its national broadband network is ‘built and fully operational’

"legislation governing the NBN build requires a declaration the job is done before December 31st"

Oh, so that's when a project is finished : when there is a law that says it has to be.

Not when the job is actually done.

Thanks for the heads-up.

US Department of Homeland Security warns American business not to use Chinese tech or let data behind the Great Firewall

A fine list of risks indeed

And you can replace every instance of PRC with USA and it still rings true.

UK firm NOW: Pensions tells some customers a 'service partner' leaked their data all over 'public software forum'

That's not a joke - it's perfectly reasonable.

Earth observation chief Dr Josef Aschbacher takes reins at European Space Agency

"The Orion capsule is designed to have a considerable amount of redundancy in its operations"

Oh, so it wasn't made by Boeing then . . .

Right, I'll just exit stage left.

$900bn coronavirus stimulus bill includes $600 for most Americans, $50 in monthly internet subsidies, $1.9bn to help rid the US of Huawei kit

"News of this funding will be welcomed by the myriad smaller wireless carriers"

What makes them think that they'll be getting any of that ? Ajit Pai is going to make sure that the BIG carriers get the lion's share of that money.

NHS awards £23m two-year deal to controversial Peter Thiel AI firm Palantir

Palantir, a stock value

I googled Palantir and half of the results of the first page discuss its stock value.

I then did a search on IBM and there was only one result on the first page concerning its stock value. The rest was all about tech.

I think that's all I need to know about Palantir. Nice name, but there's nothing behind it. I guess that's a perfect choice for the NHS.

Business intelligence vendor MicroStrategy reveals it’s bought a billion bucks of bitcoin

"a genuine bitcoin believer"

There's one born every minute, as the saying goes.

Google says it’s the cleanest cloud, also reveals deal with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company for new cloud region

So, Google is consorting with more anti-democratic overlords. And ?

Google is a multinational conglomerate. It bows before Beijing. It mouths words of equality and trust in democratic countries to make itself sound nice.

Meanwhile, it mines everyone's activities as much as it can to sell data to ad companies. It lies about how it steals our data. That is what it does. The rest is just PR.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

"The whole point of continuous delivery is to make each release as stable as the one before."

Someone should tell that to Microsoft.

Oh no, wait, Borkzilla already is as stable as the one before. Never mind.

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

A think tank

Another name for a group of partisan experts whose sole job is to fabricate a viable-looking excuse for you own incompetence.

SolarWinds releases known attack timeline, new data suggests hackers may have done a dummy run last year

"a dummy run to see if the intrusion would be detected"

And it wasn't.

Hacked twice, and stayed blind until 18K customers were infected.

Congrats on the quality of your monitoring software, SolarWinds !

Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again

What is really surprising is that this happened to a company that is supposed to have tools that manage network security for their customers.

It is quite obvious that either those tools are not up to snuff, or said company was not using them itself.

Either way, it is very sloppy.

"But I do wonder if what we have subsequently built atop that also suffers from too much of the same optimism and faith in humanity. "

Said optimism and faith in humanity would have been quickly destroyed had said engineers taken a gander at the forums in SlashDot. Maybe they would have realized the scope of the monster they were createing.

Nonsense

First of all, congratulations on inserting your pet peeve into a totally unrelated discussion. Points docked for contradicting yourself though.

Second : we can secure electronic voting systems, it's just that the current buddy system that is in place prevents that from happening.

Third : election processes can be very secure. Nobody has successfully hacked into the French election process in ages. Some have tried in very local areas, and all have been caught out. Of course, it's a lot harder to hack an election process based on paper, observers, years of experience and people who actually believe in Democracy.